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After reading this article you will learn about Integration and Disintegration of Personality.
Integration of Personality:
Personality is the synthetic unity of all personal traits. All the mental traits—intelligence, emotions and sentiments, impulses, volitions, native and acquired reactions, must be organized and integrated into a unity. The uniting of all mental traits into personality is called integration.
Complete integration is the ideal of personality. A sound personality comprises reaction tendencies that are not loosely organized but closely related to integrated.
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They are gradually reorganized and reconstructed according to more dominant interests and ideals. Although gradually changing during long periods of time, the personality usually possesses a continuity of pattern which the person himself and others recognize. In every person there is the primary or dominant self, which is his innermost characteristic self.
It has a special unity which tends to endure, and is expressed in certain familiar reaction tendencies. McDougall regards integration of personality as integration of intellect and integration of character all the conflicting reaction tendencies should be harmonized and organised gradually and integrated with the dominant trends.
A personality should be well-integrated and flexible. An integrated and inflexible personality cannot adapt itself to the- changing environment. An ideal personality should be integrated and flexible. It should reveal in some degree the characteristics of integration, consistency, persistency, and flexibility.
Disintegration of Personality:
The conflicting reaction tendencies in a person may not be harmonized and organized into a unity. The disturbances of personality are due to disintegration or dissociation. The term dissociation applies to all forms of disintegration of consciousness into separate parts.
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It is a state in which certain activities are no longer integrated with the personality, but are split off from it and coexist with its other activities. It covers practically all mental abnormalities. There are sensory dissociation in the form of anesthesia ideational dissociation in the form of hallucinations and delusion, and motor dissociation in the form of automatisms.
Dissociated or alternating personalities are interesting phenomena. Insanity is due to mental disintegration. An insane person is torn between conflicting demands of reality and hallucinatory, unreal world.